Resources for Scottish genealogy

Scotland has been part of the United Kingdom since the Acts of Union in 1707, but has retained its own legal and educational systems, its own church and culture.

Historical context

Nearly two millennia ago, the country’s tribes fought the Romans (and lost, but the Romans realized they could go no further); Hadrian’s Wall and the Antonine Wall were built to keep the Caledonians out of Roman Britannia. The Romans later withdrew from the British Isles; Christianity arrived in Scotland around the 6th century; two centuries later, the Vikings arrived in the Northern Isles, then started settlements on the mainland while continuing raids. In the mid-9th century, the Scottish tribes united and defeated the Vikings, who nonetheless remained in Shetland and Orkney. By the 10th century, those Norsemen were Christians, and by the 15th century, the Northern Isles were permanently joined to Scotland. From medieval times, England treated its northern neighbor as an unruly territory to be dominated; there were two wars of Scottish independence in the late 13th and early 14th centuries which confirmed Scotland’s status as a separate kingdom. The Protestant Reformation reached Scotland in the 15th century; by the mid-16th century, Scotland’s Presbyterian Kirk (Church) was founded. In 1603, James VI of Scotland assumed the English and Irish thrones, but this union of the three kingdoms was not to last. Religious strife between Protestants and Catholics continued even after the Acts of Union, and Scottish Lowlanders and Highlanders were at odds: the former more welcoming of the English, the latter far less. The defeat of Bonnie Prince Charlie’s Jacobite rising in the mid-18th century confirmed Scotland’s role as a nation within the United Kingdom.

Although these battles over the centuries did result in the torching and destruction of some towns, archives throughout Scotland have survived intact, which means today’s genealogists have many record sets to research their ancestry!

As always, keep in mind that the spelling of family names was not standardized until the 20th century. In particular, for any name starting with “Mc”, search also for the variant “Mac” and vice versa.

Note also that in Scotland, two languages other than English are spoken: Scots (a sister language of English), sometimes called Broad Scots, spoken mostly in the Lowlands and Northern Isles (and in the north of Northern Ireland facing Scotland), and Scottish Gaelic (related to Irish), the indigenous Celtic language previously spoken throughout the Highlands but now mainly spoken in the Outer Hebrides and and the western Highlands. This FamilySearch document (PDF) may be useful for understanding where these languages were and are spoken.

Scottish resources at Geneanet

There are Scottish collections available at Geneanet, but they are not directly accessible through a Scotland page or portal. Instead, our collections are associated with counties or regions of the United Kingdom. Moreover, for technical reasons, the UK regions we use are the 1975-1996 regions, not the council areas in use since. As an extreme example, at Geneanet, records from the council areas Glasgow City, North and South Lanarkshire, Renfrewshire and East Renfrewshire, North, South, and East Ayrshire, East and West Dunbartonshire, and Inverclyde are all searchable under Strathclyde. That said, some regions didn’t change in 1996: Shetland, Orkney, Borders. Most of our holdings about Scotland are digitized books in our Genealogy Library for Premium members, and volunteer contributions (which are always free) such as our Save our Graves project. If your ancestor fell in World War I in France or Belgium and is buried in Europe, it’s possible a Geneanet volunteer has photographed his grave or memorial.

Scottish genealogy resources

We have compiled a list of resources for Scottish genealogy which we believe will be useful for you. If you know of a good resource we missed, please let us know in the comments!

• ScotslandsPeople. This is the official site of the National Records of Scotland and is an excellent resource for searching government records and archives (see their guide here) and obtaining document images for a fee. There is access to the statutory registers of births, marriages, and deaths (civil records started in 1855; a PDF summary is here); census returns; church records; valuation rolls; and legal records from Scotland’s courts of law. Some unindexed record images can be browsed; however, in most cases, there is a pay-per-view system (credits, vouchers) to see a source document after finding an entry in an index. For privacy reasons, births less than 100 years old, marriages and divorces less than 75 years old, and deaths less than 50 years old are only available for purchase as official certificates.
• The National Records of Scotland. In addition to ScotlandsPeople described above, the NRS (previously known as the National Archives of Scotland) has other sites and resources of interest to genealogists. Start with the National Records of Scotland Family History Guide. ScotlandsPlaces has historical maps and other data. ScotlandsCensus has an historical timeline of the census and the NRS’ main site has detailed information about each of the censuses (every ten years starting in 1841; 1921 the most recent available). Scottish Handwriting has online resources and in-person classes in Edinburgh in palaeography, the study of historical forms of handwriting (the UK National Archives has a useful page as well). Don’t miss the NRS’ informative guide about the pre-civil Old Parish Registers of the Church of Scotland (births, christenings, banns, marriages, deaths and burials) 1553-1854, which are available at ScotlandsPeople.
• The Scottish Council on Archives. This nonprofit organization supports archives at every level in Scotland, including community groups, with helpful best-practices for archivists, advice for historians and genealogists, and an informative family history page. Don’t miss the SCA’s handy Scottish Ancestry Guide (PDF).
• Ancestry.co.uk. Geneanet’s parent company has a strong presence in the UK and if you are trying to find long-lost American cousins through genealogy or genetic genealogy (DNA), Ancestry is an excellent choice. Start with Ancestry’s Scotland portal.
• FamilySearch. This free site run by the LDS church has a wiki page on Scottish genealogy, including a table showing pre- and post-1974 regions. There is a guide to Scottish genealogy (PDF) which is 15 years old, but nonetheless has useful information for genealogists getting acquainted with Scottish genealogy. Three collections of interest are: Scotland Births and Baptisms 1564-1950; Scotland Marriages 1561-1910; and Scotland Church Records and Kirk Session Records 1658-1919.
• National Library of Scotland. This site has a number of useful resources: a family history portal, a guide to Scottish newspaper indexes, an extensive maps collection, Scottish Post Office Directories, and even a portal at the Internet Archive, with titles such as The Imperial Gazetteer of Scotland, 1868.
• Scottish Genealogy Society. Founded in 1953 and based in Edinburgh, the Society has a wide range of resources for researching genealogy in Scotland.
• Forces War Records. This UK site, a sister company of Geneanet, has a wide range of collections concerning UK soldiers.
• Scottish Military Research Group. This nonprofit is an invaluable resource for researching your Scottish military ancestor.
• GENUKI. This volunteer-driven site dedicated to UK and Ireland genealogy has a Scotland portal.
• Visit Scotland. This site by Scotland’s national tourist board has a page on ancestral research and offers a list of professional genealogists throughout Scotland.
• The Highland Archive Centre. Located in Inverness, the center has archives from the 14th century (details here).
• Cyndi’s List. Although some resources listed on Cyndi’s Scotland page are dated, others are more recent.
• The Scottish Archive Network. SCAN is an older site, and some resources may be online elsewhere, but the site is worth a visit.
• The Church of Scotland. See this page for information about where and how to access Church of Scotland historical records.
• Scottish Mining Website. If your ancestor worked in the mines, don’t miss this resource which covers all aspects of miners’ lives including accidents and disasters.
• Scottish Catholic Archives. If your ancestor was Catholic, look into these collections.
• Court of the Lord Lyon. This website (with its .scot domain name!) is Scotland’s heraldic authority. If you have any nobles in your clans reaching back 350 years, the Lord Lyon will know about the arms issued. Note that the index of All Arms Bearings in Scotland from 1672 to the early 20th century is available at ScotlandsPeople, with the customary fee to view images. Check out the Lyon Court’s Vimeo or Youtube channels!
• Scotland BDM. This free site is an exchange for sharing birth/marriage/death information about ancestors in Scotland.
• Friends of Dundee City Archives. This association supports the work of archivists in Dundee. Of particular interest: the Dundee Council Graveyards Burial Records resource.
• The Scottish Emigration Database. This project undertaken years ago at the University of Aberdeen documents Scottish emigrants to non-European ports for specific time periods a century ago. See the links page for other emigration resources.
• Anglo Scots Family History Society. The Manchester and Lancashire Family History Society has an Anglo-Scots page and databases.
• The University of St Andrews in Fife has a special collections section in its library which houses the university’s archives, photographs, and manuscripts, some reaching back to the 15th century when the university was founded.
• Scottish Jewish Archives Center. Founded in 1987 and based in Garnethill Synagogue in Glasgow, this resource documents the history of Jewish people in Scotland since the 18th century.
• Gazetteer for Scotland. This site, supported by the School of GeoSciences of the University of Edinburgh and The Royal Scottish Geographical Society, is a useful resource for pinpointing places in Scotland.
• The Gazette. This site has indexes of the Edinburgh Gazette and may have useful nuggets for genealogists concerning companies, wills and probate, awards and accreditations, and insolvency.
• The University of Aberdeen. Visit the university’s Library portal starting with its Archive Collections which include records of families, estates, organizations, and businesses.
• Statistical Accounts of Scotland. This project by EDINA of the University of Edinburgh can give you useful historical information about the places where your ancestor lived in Scotland in the early 19th century.
• Hathitrust. Founded in 2008, this site is a nonprofit collaborative of academic and research libraries with over 17 million digitized books, periodicals, and images and belongs in the toolkit of every genealogist. Digitized tomes from the Google Books project can be found here. There are public domain books concerning Scotland available for download (per page, or entire book); for example, Scottish Parochial Registers by William B. Turnbull, published in Edinburgh by T.G. Stevenson in 1849. Or: The Origin and Signification of Scottish Surnames by Clifford Stanley Sims, 1862. Or even: The Surnames of Scotland: Their Origin, Meaning, and History by George Fraser Black, 1946. Or the Scottish Genealogy chapter of A Supplement to How to Write the History of a Family: A Guide for the Genealogist by W.P.W. Phillimore, 1896.
• Scottish Indexes is a volunteer-driven site with some interesting record sets not found elsewhere.
• Culture Perth & Kinross. This site has a number of databases of interest to anyone with an ancestor from the area.
• Dumfries & Galloway Council. See the Historical Indexes section for records specific to this region.
• Barry Griffin’s name heatmaps. Barry’s no-frills site offers a very useful resource: a heatmap of surnames in Scotland, compiled from the 1901 census. Enter a family name; you will see if the name was common throughout Scotland, or concentrated in a particular area.
• Glasgow City Archives. Rich collections are available, most held by the Mitchell Library.
• Virtual Mitchell. This older site from the Mitchell Library in Glasgow has thousands of images of Glasgow’s streets and buildings from the Mitchell’s Archives and Special Collections and other sources. Be aware however that images are not high resolution and are watermarked. It is possible to order a print of an image.
• The Scottish Association of Family History Societies. This umbrella organization of Scottish family history societies promotes and encourages the study of Scottish family history.
• Scottish Highlander Photo Archive. The SHPA has over 8000 digitized photographs from the studio of Andrew Paterson and his son Hector in Inverness from 1897 to 1980, as well as from other sources.
• The Internet Archive has a collection of historical publications of the Scottish Record Society.
• Facebook groups. This platform has become popular for genealogy-focused groups. “Scottish Genealogy”, “Scottish Ancestry and Genealogical Research”, “Scottish Ancestor”, and other groups may have members willing to assist you if you have a question. These groups are usually private, so be sure to understand and accept each group’s rules.
• Electric Scotland. This site by Alastair McIntyre has many historical resources.
• The Hawick Word Book (PDF). This e-book by Douglas Scott documents people, places, and dialect of the Scottish Borders town of Hawick.

Did we miss any resources? Please let us know in the comments! And don’t hesitate to ask for help in our forums where we have a United Kingdom section. Geneanet members are helpful and questions are monitored by support!